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In this presentation, we will share our experiences and some lessons learned from supporting economists with various aspects of their survey-related research. As original data collection needs have grown in our organization, we contract services for survey platforms, recruiting participants, using vendor panels, pre-testing questionnaires with focus groups, 3rd party IRBs, questionnaire development, statistical disclosure review and documentation for releasing public use files. Many of the survey projects involve researchers from multiple institutions, adding a layer of complexity. We hope to present useful advice for others to consider as they are contracting with a vendor for survey support.

The U.S. Census Bureau is investigating nonrespondent subsampling strategies for use in the 2017 Economic Census. In previous research, we developed an optimized allocation procedure for subsampling nonrespondents that selects larger systematic samples in domains with lower initial response. This article expands on our previous research by exploring improvements to the optimal allocation method; we investigate refinements to the previous procedure that incorporate measures of respondent balance with respect to the original sample. The revised allocation procedures have simultaneous objectives of allocating high proportions of sample in domains that indicate potential nonresponse bias and of equalizing response rates across domains. We examine the effects of the alternative allocation approaches on Horvitz-Thompson estimates via a simulation study using data from the 2014 Annual Survey of Manufactures.

This paper contributes to the debate on the adequate elicitation of individual risk attitudes in general socio-economic surveys. A multi-item question on the willingness to take risk, a very short form of the DOSPERT scale ( Weber et al., 2002 ) and a series of lottery tasks are compared with respect to the quality of the answers and the predictive validity of the derived risk measures. The quality of the collected data appears to be high. All the measures are informative about individual's attitudes while item nonresponse is mostly unproblematic. The measures however differ in their predictive power, with the lottery-based measures exhibiting only weak predictive validity. When the scope of the assessment is to predict behaviour, domain specific risk measures seem to be more appropriate. Embedding a short DOSPERT scale in general surveys appears to be very promising for empirical applications in social sciences that use survey-based risk measures.

Making successful policies for manufacturing or glo balized business sectors require “honest” answers b y the respondents in the surveys. When some respondents cheat in their answers to the questions in a survey for a variety of reasons, the survey results become useless. Currently, there is no appropriate probability model to address this phenomenon “cheat ing” in a survey. An efficient methodology is needed to estimate the proportion of “cheaters” in a survey and assess the statistical significance of the estimate. Such a methodology does not exist now in the literature. This article fulfils the need. In a pioneering manner, this article has formulated a bi variate probability model to explain the “cheating” in surveys. Several statistical properties of this new model are identified and explained. For illustrati on of the new probability model, the responses from 259 l ess and 217 more educated Germans about xenophobia are considered. The xenophobia is a stumbling block to a successful business operation in this globalized economy. Two psychometric reasons: “Insecurity level” and “social pressure” behind the xenophobia are captured with the help of the probab ility model and they are explained. The model of th is article helps to predict “honesty” versus “cheating ” levels in a survey. A statistical testing procedu re is prepared to check whether an estimated “social pres sure” level is significant.

Carbon emission reductions through reducing deforestation and forest degradation or REDD+ scheme of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change could not be achieved without understanding the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation. Until recently, only a handful of study has focused on such drivers. Cambodia experienced rapid deforestation and forest degradation despite growing international interests in protecting forests for carbon revenue generation. This paper was designed to assess livelihood of forest-dependent community and drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in Cambodia. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to collect socio-economic data from 42 households living in Phnom Tbeng forest, where annual deforestation rate was about 2.4% between 2004 and 2009. Our results suggest that local people depend on forests for income generation, subsistence use and social identity. About 90% of the respondents believed that deforestation was resulted from illegal logging, slush and burn agricultural practices, land clearing for large plantation, land encroachment, firewood extraction, charcoal production and forest fire. As the population has increased rapidly and almost 100% of local people depend on fuelwood for cooking, fuelwood collection will continue to cause deforestation and forest degradation unless alternative sources of affordable energy are provided. Appropriate policy interventions should be proposed to reduce the drivers obtained in this study because if drivers cannot be reduced, it is not possible to reduce deforestation and forest degradation, and related carbon emissions.

It is very likely that electronic means of data collection will become a standard for socio-economic surveys in the near future. As surveys move from paper form to personal digital assistants (PDAs) or tablets, there is a need to evaluate if such a shift will affect the quality of the data. To explore the potential biases that data collection through PDAs may generate, we use the third wave of Young Lives-Peru to randomly assign survey respondents between PDA-based questionnaires and paper-based questionnaires. The study shows that data collected through PDAs has a higher level of agreement when compared to paper-based responses. However, there are a number of situations where paper-based questionnaires do not easily translate to PDA-based questionnaires. In addition, the study highlights the need to improve training as different surveyor’s characteristics (age, gender, education, etc.) may also be correlated with some observed differences between PDA and paper-based questionnaires.

This paper describes innovation-related data available from international economic surveys conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. These data are collected in conjunction with the international transactions accounts of the United States and in surveys of the operations of multinational companies (MNCs). The paper focuses on five innovation-related series: receipts and payments of royalties and license fees; exports and imports of research, development, and testing services; sales of services by foreign affiliates classified in the research and development services industry; MNC RD and MNC R&D employment.

Web-based surveys have become increasingly common in economic, marketing, and other social science research. However, questions exist about the comparability of data gathered using a web interview and data gathered using more traditional survey modes, particularly for surveys on household economic behavior. Differences between data from different survey modes may arise through two different mechanisms: sample selectivity due to (lack of) web access and mode effects. This study leverages the randomized experimental design of the mixed-mode Cognitive Economics Study to examine mode effects separately from sample selectivity issues. In particular, we examine differences in survey response rates, item nonresponse, and data quality due to mode effects. Our results indicate that, in contrast to mail mode, web mode surveys (1) attain higher response rates among web users, (2) display lower item nonresponse, and (3) elicit more precise values for financial measures. We conclude that, for web-using populations, web mode surveys appear to result in more usable data than mail mode surveys, and these data appear to be of high quality. However, we also find no systematic mode differences in the categorical distributions of responses to items, providing no evidence that pooling data from the two modes is inadvisable.

This study concerns financial news articles, which reflect the monetary policy during the US sub prime mortgage crisis. In particular we consider official announcements conducted by the Federal Reserve and its leading representatives. We aim to quantify such information using dependency parsing techniques and statistical measures. In addition, we examine the correlations between the monetary policy and the stock markets by modeling composite index volatilities as functions of key publications. A prototype for the classification of news is targeted, which should reveal the economical impact of events. An eminent aspect of our study is the identification, extraction, and representation of topic-related features and the corresponding instances.

A major thrust of some large statistical agencies with regard to their survey operations over the past few years has been to reduce respondent burden, increase the efficiency of their production process, improve the quality of end products, and respond to new information needs. To meet these objectives, a rethinking of some production processes has been necessary. This article describes an overall strategy for respondent follow-up in economic surveys. The results of a trial application of the proposed strategy to the Canadian Annual Retail Trade Survey are presented for illustration purposes.

This paper presents the principles of the semantic analysis used in a system for the summary of economic surveys. We will focus on the conceptual representation that is based on semantic primitives. Because of the different relations (casual or structural links) between concepts, this model is powerful in the representation of language structural properties. Besides, the summary goal allows a proper definition of significant features necessary for the elaboration of a taxonomy. The requested adaptability to various and overlapping economic domains induces a hierarcfucal organization of primitives sets. The notion of reference then allows the definition of contextual links between concepts. The analysis is composed of two phases. The first one is syntactico-semantic and builds a conceptual representation of the sentence content according to the conceptual graphs formalism. The second one, essentially pragmatic, removes the paraphrastic structures that would not be detected by the syntactico-semant...

This paper, which is addressed to the business and institutional survey operations of national statistical agencies, is a proposal for a sampling scheme and a system of coordinated samples selected according to this scheme. By presenting an analogy between the taxation system (or the duty of governments to collect taxes and the obligation of businesses to pay them) and the statistical system (or the necessity of governments to collect information and the obligation of businesses to provide it) the paper provides a basis for a definition of response burden and the management of a system to control its equitable distribution. Sample rotation is shown to be simple to manage within the proposed system. Since a consequence of maximal distribution of response burden is maximal coverage of the survey population in any given period the system provides an opportunity for continuous updating of the survey frame with respect to industrial classification and other aspects subject to deterioration over time. Finally, the paper suggests that a statistical agency that can demonstrate the fairness of its distribution of response burden is in a better position to insist on the legal obligation of response to its surveys.

Fresh results of a 2006 survey of members of the American Economic Association suggest that many economists do not seem to believe that American democracy is working—that is, advancing society’s welfare. Regardless of political party affiliation, a large majority of economists appear to be skeptical of elected officials and the political process. We discuss these findings in relation to what many, including ourselves, perceive to be a problem in the economics profession, namely, an undue focus on the policy status quo. If economists do not believe that the political process works well, why is there so much focus on the status quo, and, more specifically, so little challenge to status quo interventions?

The 2003 Survey of Small Business Finances (SSBF) screening interview had significant unit nonresponse and therefore some type of nonresponse adjustment was deemed necessary. The approach used in the 2003 survey differed from that used in previous surveys. The current paper examines the impact of this technique on weights, point estimates and variance of the estimates by comparing the approach ultimately implemented for the 2003 survey to alternative approaches. The results using the 2003 SSBF hybrid method are very similar to the traditional weighting class method and the propensity stratification methods. Even though the hybrid technique did in some instances increase the variance of the weights over the traditional weighting class adjustment method, the differences were quite small. In addition the hybrid method decreased the variance for the weights as well as the some of the point estimates.

Surveys do! We examine the forecasting power of four alternative methods of forecasting U.S. inflation out-of-sample: time series ARIMA models; regressions using real activity measures motivated from the Phillips curve; term structure models that include linear, non-linear, and arbitrage-free specifications; and survey-based measures. We also investigate several optimal methods of combining forecasts. Our results show that surveys outperform the other forecasting methods and that the term structure specifications perform relatively poorly. We find little evidence that combining forecasts using means or medians, or using optimal weights with prior information produces superior forecasts to survey information alone. When combining forecasts, the data consistently places the highest weights on survey information.

A limitation of most empirical cross-country studies that focus on determinants of gross domestic product (GDP) is that they fail to distinguish explicitly between inputs used in production and conditions that facilitate production. For example, physical capital, human capital, and labor are production inputs, whereas the quality of institutions, macroeconomic stability, and market quality are conditions that facilitate production. This article takes this distinction seriously and uses a stochastic frontier approach to study factors affecting economic performance. A panel data set of 71 countries for the 1980-98 periods is used to estimate a production frontier with physical capital, human capital, and labor as inputs. The article also analyzes what drives productive efficiency, using the institutional framework, macroeconomic stability, market quality, and urbanization as possible explanatory factors. Urbanization turns out to be an important determinant, with the rule of law, inflation rate, and market quality also affecting productive efficiency.

The New York Fed’s Survey of Primary Dealers plays a key role in the Federal Reserve’s understanding of market expectations for monetary policy and the economy, providing timely and comprehensive dealer insight into a range of topics. In recent years, the survey has evolved to reflect the changing macroeconomic environment brought about by the financial crisis and by the Fed’s move into new policy tools aimed at adjusting the size and composition of its balance sheet and giving more explicit forward guidance on the path of short-term interest rates. This study offers an in-depth look at the survey and discusses its structure and evolution.

Die Kumulation von Haushaltsstichproben steht auf der Agenda einer europäischen Neuordnung von Haushaltsbefragungen. Im Rahmen des Projektes ‚Amtliche Statistik und sozioökonomische Fragestellungen‘ des Statistischen Bundesamtes und in Abstimmung mit den EUROSTAT-Erfordernissen für neue Haushaltsstichproben (EU-SILC) werden in diesem Beitrag Wege diskutiert, wie jährliche Haushaltsbudgeterhebungen zu einem Gesamtergebnis analog einer nur mehrjährig erfolgten aber umfangreicheren Erhebung zusammengefasst werden können. Dazu wird ein Kumulationskonzept entwickelt und in die Diskussion eingebracht. Aufbauend auf diesem Kumulationskonzept sind dann in einem zweiten Teil Simulationsrechnungen zur Evaluation der Kumulation durchzuführen.

Expectations about future inflation are generally thought to play an important role in households’ decisions about spending and saving. They are also of great interest to central bankers, who take them into account when determining policy or assessing the effectiveness of communications with the public. To help improve existing survey measures of inflation expectations, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently joined with other institutions and academic consultants to develop a set of survey questions that will yield more reliable information on households’ inflation expectations, inflation uncertainty, and expectations about future wage changes.

Over the past several years, U.S. homebuyers have increasingly favored fixed-rate mortgages over adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs). Indeed, ARMs have dropped to less than 10 percent of all residential mortgage originations, a near-record low. One might speculate that the decline in the ARM share has been driven by “one-off” factors relating to the financial crisis. However, a statistical analysis suggests that recent trends can largely be explained by the same factors that have historically shaped mortgage choice—most notably, the term structure of interest rates and its effects on the relative price of different types of mortgages. Supply-side factors, in particular a rise in the share of mortgages eligible to be securitized by the housing government-sponsored enterprises, also play a role in the low current ARM share.

This paper reports preliminary findings from a Federal Reserve Bank of New York research program aimed at improving survey measures of inflation expectations. We find that seemingly small differences in how inflation is referred to in a survey can lead respondents to consider significantly different price concepts. For near-term inflation, the "prices in general" question in the monthly Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers can elicit responses that focus on the most visible prices, such as gasoline or food. Questions on the "rate of inflation" can lead to responses on the prices that U.S. citizens pay in general - an interpretation, or concept, closer to the definition of inflation that economists have in mind; they also lead to both lower levels of reported inflation and to lower disagreement among respondents. In addition, we present results associated with new survey questions that assess the degree of individual uncertainty about future inflation outcomes as well as future expected wage changes. Finally, using the panel dimension of the surveys, we find that individual responses exhibit considerable persistence, both in the expected level of inflation and in forecast uncertainty. Respondents who are more uncertain make larger revisions to their expectations in the next survey.

Spatial poverty comparisons are investigated in three African countries using multidimensional indicators of well-being. The work is analogous to the univariate stochastic dominance literature in that it seeks poverty orderings that are robust to the choice of multidimensional poverty lines and indices. In addition, the study seeks to ensure that the comparisons are robust to aggregation procedures for multiple welfare variables. In contrast to earlier work, the methodology applies equally well to what can be defined as union, intersection, and intermediate approaches to dealing with multidimensional indicators of well-being. Furthermore, unlike much of the stochastic dominance literature, this work computes the sampling distributions of the poverty estimators to perform statistical tests of the difference in poverty measures. The methods are applied to two measures of well-being, the log of household expenditures per capita and children's height-forage z scores, using data from the 1988 Ghana Living Standards Study survey, the 1993 National Household Survey in Madagascar, and the 1999 National Household Survey in Uganda. Bivariate poverty comparisons are at odds with univariate comparisons in several interesting ways. Most important, it cannot always be concluded that poverty is lower in urban areas in one region compared with that in rural areas in another, even though univariate comparisons based on household expenditures per capita almost always lead to that conclusion.

The effects of globalization on income distribution within rich and poor countries are a matter of controversy. While international trade theory in its most abstract formulation implies that increased trade and foreign investment should make income distribution more equal in poor countries and less equal in rich countries, finding these effects has proved elusive. The paper presents another attempt to discern the effects of globalization by using the new data derived directly from household surveys. The paper looks at the impact of openness (trade/GDP ratio) and direct foreign investment on relative income shares across the entire income distribution. In contrast to what one would expect from theory, we find strong evidence that at low average income level, it is the rich who benefit from openness. As income level rises, that is around the income level of $5-7,000 per capita at international prices, the situation changes and it is the relative income of the poor and the middle class that rises compared to the rich. It seems that openness makes income distribution worse before making it better—or differently that the effect of openness on on income distribution depends on country’s average income level.

This paper documents the features of a 1998 social accounting matrix (SAM) for Thailand. It begins with a description of the overall economy both via a macro SAM and a national accounts balance sheet. The macro SAM was the result of aggregating a micro SAM; a mapping of the final micro SAM to the macro SAM is presented. The micro SAM was a modified version of a SAM obtained from the Thai Development Research Institute (TDRI). The paper describes the modification process in detail. The original dataset obtained from TDRI was a "balanced™ matrix." The converted SAM, after the modification, was still balanced. It was therefore unnecessary to apply any balancing procedure. The final 1998 micro SAM for Thailand has 61 sectors, 3 household types, and 3 factors (labor, agricultural capital, and non-agricultural capital). Particularly helpful for the intended analysis on energy and environmental policy is that it has 8 primary energy sectors, 5 transportation sectors, and a health and medical treatment commodity account.

The last few years have seen a proliferation of attempts by various institutions to create a framework that would enable analysts to have a broad overview of all transactions in the Malawian economy. It was decided that 1998, the most recent year for which a comprehensive data set is available, would be the base year for the SAM. The National Statistical Office conducted a major household survey which provided information on budget shares, incomes and many other social-economic characteristics of households.

International audience

In response to the Covid-19 crisis, the European Central Bank (ECB) has relaunched a massive asset purchase programme within its combined-arms monetary strategy. This paper surveys and discusses the theory and the evidence of the central bank's unconventional monetary tools for the euro area. It analyses the role of the asset purchase programmes in the ECB's toolkit and the associated risks, focusing specifically on the gradual unwinding of these unconventional initiatives. Finally, the paper offers some insight into the possible evolution of the ECB's monetary policy.

Numerous observers have charged US agricultural data systems with conceptual obsolescence Although some modernization has occurred, particularly in providing information about commercial farms, agricultural and rural data bases have failed to keep up with production and structural changes in the sector and in rural America I propose a production paradigm for the food and fiber system based on the concept of a primary agricultural producer Among other attributes, the concept of a primary agricultural producer provides opportunities to redirect existing surveys, possibly including the Census of Agriculture, to the collection of broader rural or natural resources data sets Before such a redirection can be made, however, a new paradigm of rural people and resources is needed

Les recherches empiriques en sciences humaines et sociales necessitent la manipulation de nombreux fichiers : differents jeux de donnees, de multiples programmes, qu'ils soient destines a la manipulation de donnees, aux traitements statistiques, aux estimations econometriques ou a des simulations, et de nombreux fichiers successifs de resultats. Maitriser l’ensemble des etapes du projet de recherche est indispensable si l’on souhaite pouvoir reproduire ou repliquer les resultats a long terme. Cette rigueur (fiabilite, tracabilite, reproductibilite), est desormais de plus en plus exigee par notre profession ainsi que par les editeurs de revues scientifiques. Apres avoir mis en evidence les enjeux de cette « recherche reproductible » (Claerbout, 1990) pour les economistes, nous en declinons les principes autour de trois axes simples : organiser les etapes du projet et les fichiers, ecrire des programmes clairs et documentes, et automatiser le plus possible les operations jusqu’au document presentant les resultats. Ces principes sont alors illustres par differentes bonnes pratiques, en allant des plus simples au plus sophistiquees, avec un focus particulier sur les fonctionnalites des logiciels les plus courants en economie (Stata, R, SAS, Matlab, Mathematica, Gams).

International audience; Equity (or, its counterpart, inequity) plays a fundamental role in the evaluation of social welfare in different dimensions. In this paper, we revisit the concept of inequity-in the sense of unequal distributions-across individuals, time, and states of the world using a unified framework that generalizes the standard expected discounted utilitarianism approach. We propose a general measure of welfare as equity equivalents and a corresponding inequity index. We show that allowing for different attitudes toward inequity across different dimensions covers a scope of possible inequity preferences with different interpretations. We then prove that the order of aggregation across the different dimensions matters for welfare evaluations. Finally, we show that many of the welfare-theoretical approaches recently developed in the literature can be interpreted as special cases of this general framework.

This paper provides a systematic review of studies on the effects of human capital interventions on entrepreneurial performance in industrialized countries. We identify 21 experimental and quasi‐experimental studies published before September 2018. These studies examine the effects of business training, formal education, and entrepreneurship education. Their performance outcomes include firm profits, firm size, and entrepreneurial earnings. The main finding across these studies is that these interventions do not have statistically significant effects. Formal education is the only exception, showing positive effects on firm profits and entrepreneurial earnings, yet these effects are small in magnitude. Evidence is inconclusive regarding effect duration. These findings stand in stark contrast to correlational studies, which tend to find large positive correlations between human capital interventions and entrepreneurial performance. We therefore conclude that correlational studies tend to overestimate the benefits of human capital interventions. Moreover, our estimates show that the interventions are associated with moderately low additionality.

Scores in standardized international student achievement tests and some recent adult literacy studies provide interesting data on the quality of educational outputs and on the skill level of the population that can be a useful complement to the data on the quantity of schooling which have been most commonly used in the growth literature. This paper describes the most recent available primary data on the subject, reviews different attempts to organize, standardize, and summarize them, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the existing indicators and their potential usefulness as explanatory variables in empirical analyses of the determinants of income and welfare levels and growth rates. A final section investigates the distribution of these indicators across a sample of 21 OECD countries.

Comparisons of pre and postreform economic growth in India are widely researched in the literature. This paper adds to this literature, but with a sectoral growth accounting perspective. We compare the proximate sources of economic growth in India during the 1950-1980 periods, the so-called Nehruvian socialist regime, with that of the post-1980 period, which includes the pro-business reforms in the 1980s and more aggressive pro-market reforms in the 1990s. We document two important features of India's growth dynamics. First, the overriding importance of the services sector in India's growth is not new, but it has always been the case in independent India. However, there has been a major shift in the composition of service sector growth. While the socialist regime fostered more nonmarket services, including the government sector, the market services sector flourished in the market regime, in terms of labour productivity, TFP and economic growth. Second, the economic growth in the socialist period was substantially driven by capital accumulation, except in the nonmarket services, whereas the market regime sees a combination of both productivity and capital accumulation.

The goal of this piece is to survey the developing and rapidly growing literature on the economic consequences of COVID‐19 and the governmental responses, and to synthetize the insights emerging from a very large number of studies. This survey: (i) provides an overview of the data sets and the techniques employed to measure social distancing and COVID‐19 cases and deaths; (ii) reviews the literature on the determinants of compliance with and the effectiveness of social distancing; (iii) mentions the macroeconomic and financial impacts including the modelling of plausible mechanisms; (iv) summarizes the literature on the socioeconomic consequences of COVID‐19, focusing on those aspects related to labor, health, gender, discrimination, and the environment; and (v) summarizes the literature on public policy responses.

this paper reviews the empirical literature on foreign exchange rate expectations. Prominent issues are the forward premium puzzle, expectations formation in financial markets, heterogeneity of expectations, market microstructure, time-varying risk premiums and forecast performance. Although much has been learned in each field, this survey highlights the areas of research in which our understanding of the mechanism of exchange rate expectations is still incomplete. Our survey suggests that both irrational expectations and time-varying risk premiums account for the forward discount anomaly, that long-term expectations reverse towards their long-run equilibrium values and that heterogeneous behaviour of market participants has the potential of explaining some of the empirical regularities in the international finance literature.

This paper starts by recognizing that despite the importance of absorptive capacity, economists in particular have made only limited use of the concept. Most theoretical and empirical studies derive from other fields of research. Thus, the first task is to compare and contrast the different approaches taken in measuring absorptive capacity. The rest of the paper then sets out an example of how typically economists have proceeded, using nationally representative CIS data to measure absorptive capacity across a 10‐year period and investigating if it remains stable in the long term. This is followed by considering how firms’ characteristics vary across lower to higher levels of absorptive capacity and whether such capacity determines firms’ productivity performance across both goods and service industries. Our results show that relative to other influences, absorptive capacity as measured here — net of the impact of foreign‐ownership and human capital — has a substantial influence on exporting, innovation and undertaking R&D and thus consequently firm‐level productivity. Finally, there is a discussion of why governments should consider helping firms to boost their levels of absorptive capacity.

See also the publication in 'Journal of Economic Surveys', 26(3), 468-91.Empirical studies in spatial economics have shown that agglomeration economies may be a source of the uneven distribution of economic activities and economic growth across cities and regions. Both localization and urbanization economies are hypothesized to foster agglomeration and growth, but recent meta-analyses of this burgeoning body of empirical research show that the results are ambiguous. Recent overviews show that this ambiguity is fuelled by measurement issues and heterogeneity in terms of scale of time and space, aggregation, growth definitions, and the functional form of the models applied. Alternatively, in this paper, we argue that ambiguity may be due to a lack of research on firm-level performance in agglomerations. This research is necessary because the theories that underlie agglomeration economies are microeconomic in nature. Hierarchical or multilevel modeling, which allows micro levels and macro levels to be modeled simultaneously, is becoming an increasingly common practice in the social sciences. As illustrated by detailed Dutch data on firm-level productivity, employment growth and firm survival, we argue that these approaches are also suitable for reducing the ambiguity surrounding the agglomeration-firm performance relationship and for addressing spatial, sectoral and cross-level heterogeneity.

This study looks into the economic-driven tourism growth hypothesis in the context of SAARC countries. It also investigates the effect of landlockedness on tourism income receipt. It is based on secondary data gathered from several World Bank Reports and economic surveys of respective countries. It made use of 169 data points from SAARC's eight member countries. The data from an unbalanced panel was used. It makes use of an exploratory and analytical research design. For the impact study of independent variables on dependent variables, descriptive statistics, panel unit root testing, panel quantile regression analysis, quantile process estimates, quantile slope equality test, and symmetric quantile test are used. The GDP has a positive impact on tourism income in SAARC countries. It is found that one percent increase in the median value of GDP, the tourism income is increased by 0.219 percent. The evidence has proved the economic-driven tourism growth hypothesis, particularly regarding SAARC countries. This highlights the need for tailored tourism initiatives aimed specifically at landlocked nations.

This study examined the effect of stock market capitalization on economic growth in Kenya. The study adopted explanatory research design that is quantitative. The study was guided by neoclassical endogenous growth theory. The major sources of data were national accounts data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) Economic Surveys, Statistical Abstracts and International Financial Statistics (IFS) site for the period 1990-2021. The study used a vector error correction model. The variables were first tested for unit root thereafter Johansen cointegration Technique was used to test the long run relationship of the variables. The study found that there were unit roots at levels but became stationary after first difference. Results showed that stock market capitalization had a negative and significant long run relationship on economic growth in Kenya (β= -0.148, p